Sphinn - Wired Says Screw It To All Search Engines After SEL Inspired Spam Attack, Disallows EVERYTHING With Robots.txt

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Wired Says Screw It To All Search Engines After SEL Inspired Spam Attack, Disallows EVERYTHING With Robots.txt

Went Hot: January 14, 2008 - 2:58 pm
Posted By: mvandemar 538 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com)
Category: SEO

That'll teach those spammers! :)

13 Comments

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from ckata 538 days ago #

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Wow, that is going overboard!

from dannysullivan 538 days ago #

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Well, it is a robots.txt block on links. And the entire site itself, of course.

Look, Wired is simply reacting quickly to a problem they felt they had to react fast too -- so they went with robots.txt. I expect that in a few days, especially after the run we caused by pointing out the wiki, the blocks will go away.

from handsomerob 538 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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Maybe they'll fix the code that's tossing their descriptions in the SERPs too

http://www.handsomelogic.com/blog/youre-doing-it-wrong/meta-descriptions-youre-doing-it-wrong/

from mvandemar 538 days ago #

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Then again... maybe they just don't care about the se's at all when it comes to that section of their site.

Not everyone does, when you get right down to it.

from dzver 538 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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No one spammer cares about robots.txt. If you really want to ban search engines, you should add to your website a list of forbidden user agents and networks.

I had a performance issue in one of my websites. It was visited about 50K - 100K per day by msnbot and yahoo slurp and I have banned them this way, until the problem was solved.

from aimClear 537 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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How many times does a guy have to say I'M SORRY....

from neyne 537 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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no no no. he hasn't done it on shoemoney's blog. How about shadyseo's ? wiep's blog has no apologies on it. so the issue is not closed yet.

sheesh, if i did not know better, i would have thought that the day of atonement is here already.

i am waiting for the first lawsuit...

from mvandemar 537 days ago #

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aimClear and neyne... wtf? What does this have to do with Danny's apology? This is neither a criticism of Danny or Friday's article. This is simply reporting that Wired is responding in a manner that I would characterize as over-reacting.

from neyne 537 days ago # - show/hide this comment

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you are right. this one was actually not criticising Danny. The words "SEL inspired spam attack" are just remnants of christmas decorations. those 4 words probably stayed in author's cache from other 254356 articles on, oh so popular "SEL screwed up" topic so when he accidentaly hit CTRL+V it got pasted into the title.

give me a break.

from IncrediBILL 537 days ago #

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OK, wake up and smell the coffee...

Nothing that spams uses robots.txt, not the way SE's do anyway, so it's a knee jerk idiots response that will do nothing to stop potential spammers.

Fools. Morons. Idiots. Naive...

from mvandemar 537 days ago #

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Bill, I don't think that they meant to do it to block spammers access, I think they did it to make the pages less valuable to spammers. It's Wired, I'm pretty sure they know what robots.txt is and how it is used. It's not meant to stop bot postings, it's meant to make any links gained useless. Which, of course, it will... it's just overkill.

from Burgo 537 days ago #

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"It's Wired, I'm pretty sure they know what robots.txt is and how it is used."

Well, of course you say that... but then look at their original response of "nofollow is not for wikis" :P

from johnandrews 537 days ago #

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I tend to agree with Burgo here. The frustrations of suddenly getting this kind of attention are draining.... they need to show not only they know what they are doing (save face) but also protect themselves from the preceived threat (getting overrun by spammers). That's a tough spot to be in, so I'm not so sure they were completely lucid when they came up with that solution.

Someone could ask them if they intended to send a message like "we don't care about search and here's proof", much the way some people have come out and said "SEO is B.S." as simply a means of dealing definitively with a frustrating unknown.